Both are sweet and luscious and ideal for dessert. Both are made in the Finger Lakes and other Upstate New York wine regions.

The key difference is in how they’re made.

The ice wine method is traditional -- you might even say romantic. It’s also difficult, risky and can be costly. The other way -- for what is increasingly being called “iced” wine -- is more controlled, efficient and economical.

In traditional ice wine, the grapes are allowed to freeze naturally on the vine, then are picked by hand in the cold. Everything is uncertain: Variations in the weather could affect the timing of the harvest, the quality of the grapes and make the yield low in volume or even non-existent in some years. Picking the fruit requires venturing out into some brutal conditions,

For non-traditional iced wine, the grapes are picked during or not long after the traditional fall harvest, then frozen. There’s more control over the harvest, so the winemakers are more certain of the quantity and quality of the grapes. Plus, the weather is better for picking.

“I give a lot of credit to the people who make traditional ice wine,” said Vinny Aliperti, who currently produces the non-traditional “iced” variety as winemaker for Atwater Estate Vineyards on Seneca Lake. He is also co-owner of Billsboro Winery near Geneva. “It can be painful. There’s certainly a lot more stress involved.”

Art Hunt has been producing traditional ice wine longer than anyone in New York -- maybe even longer than anyone in the country.

“I like the traditional methods even though it can be difficult and risky,” said Hunt, owner of Hunt Country Vineyards on Keuka Lake. Hunt started making ice wine in 1987. “We’ve been doing it a long time and we think it’s worth the effort.”

New York is one of the few states where vineyards routinely reach the kinds of temperatures need to make traditional ice wine. Today, dozens of the state’s wineries make it, most in the Finger Lakes, Lake Erie or Niagara regions. The number of non-traditional “iced” wine makers also appears to be growing.

Wagner Winery located at Lodi, N.Y. on Seneca Lake. One of thei

David Lassman

But is one “better” than the other? Can a wine drinker even tell the difference between an ice or "iced" wine?

“I don’t put down the people who do it the other way or denigrate their wines,” Hunt said. “Neither is better or worse than the other. They’re just different products.”

One of the features of wine made from frozen grapes -- whether traditional or not -- is that the freezing pushes out the water, concentrating the sugars and acids, creating more intense flavor and aroma.

The question is whether the traditional on-the-vine freezing method makes for more intense or complex flavor. Art Hunt thinks there is a difference.

“When you freeze after harvest (the non traditional way), you do get some more concentrated flavors, but they’re more what you might call normal grape flavors, he said. In the traditional method, he said, “you get more complex flavors, more plum and raisin and honey. That's what happens when you leave the grapes on the vine to freeze.”

The grapes left to freeze, he added, go through “more of the spectrum, the natural way.”

Aliperti doesn’t necessarily disagree, but he says the non-traditional method can create its own intense flavor. For Atwater’s Celsius, an non-traditional iced wine, the grapes are picked late in the harvest season, once they’ve already started to dry out and become affected by what winemakers like to call “noble rot,” which can deepen and change the flavor.

“And once you freeze, you are replicating what happens on the vine (in the traditional method),” he said. “So you are getting that intensity.”

Photo: A traditionally made Riesling ice wine from Wagner Vineyards on Seneca Lake with its characteristic deep golden color.

Hunt is understandably proud of his vineyard’s long tradition with old school ice wine making (check out the winery’s video, above, celebrating the December 2017 harvest).

Hunt was inspired by early experimental efforts from the Great Western Winery in Hammondsport in the early 1980s. He opened his winery in 1981 and decided to give ice wine a try six years later. Hunt Country now boasts it is America’s oldest ice wine producer.

There is a lot of uncertainty built into the process, Hunt said. Your could, for example, lose many of the grapes left hanging on the vines to birds. Temperature fluctuations, delayed frosts, wind and other factors mount as time goes on.

“Sometimes you have no grapes at all, or the ones you have just aren’t suited to it,” he said. So there are years without ice wine.

Hunt Country ice wine 2016 Matt Kelly i2.JPG

Matt Kelly

One of the biggest uncertainties is just figuring out when to pull the grapes off the vine. It has to be very cold -- maybe 15 degrees or less -- for enough time to freeze the fruit.

“When it looks like it’s going to be 10 degrees by dawn, that’s when we get things moving, fast,” he said. In some years, that could be early December, in others it might not be until January.

Once the picking starts, it goes quickly. The frozen grapes -- Hunt’s signature ice wine uses vidal blanc -- are brittle. “They crumble like cooked bacon,” Hunt says. So they’re “gently” picked and dropped into boxes. Hunt’s crew can fill 20 to 30 boxes in an hour and have the job finished in two or three hours.

Crushing the frozen grapes to extract the juice is a “slow job,” Hunt said. The grape have the consistency of sorbet or ice cream, he said. “You press and you press, and only a tiny bit of very concentrated juice is extracted.”

All in all, Hunt said, the creation of traditional ice wine involves “a lot of slow, hard work, most of it out in the cold.”

Photo: Grapes harvested for ice wine at Hunt Country Vineyards on Keuka Lake in December 2017.

atharvest.JPG

Amanda Gumtow | Atwater Estate V

Atwater Estate Vineyards has made ice wine the traditional way in the past, but not since 2010, Aliperti said. He uses the words “prudent” and “pragmatic” to describe the process Atwater now uses for its Celsius.

The primary grape in Celsius is vignoles, a hybrid that is often used for another style of dessert wine called Late Harvest. (The grapes in Late Harvest wines are not frozen.) Vignoles is known for its tropical aromas and flavors.

For the “iced” wine, the grapes are picked later in the harvest season, after they begin showing signs of dehydration (water loss) and dessication, which is when the fungus called botrytis cinerea starts to grow. Despite the scary name, botrytis or “noble rot” can be a good thing for flavor production in wine grapes, helping dessert wines develop their sweetness.